The Heart of the Matter (2 page)

The Heart of the Matter
tells the story, principally, of Scobie, a colonial policeman trapped in a loveless marriage. Scobie has an overdeveloped sense of pity and responsibility; he is never so moved by his wan, cheerless, and complaining wife than when she looks ugly and vulnerable. At those moments, his ‘pity and responsibility reached the intensity of a passion.’ He feels ‘bound by the pathos of her unattractiveness.’ Scobie cherishes the meanness of life in the colony, for here ‘you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst.’ Scobie and his wife lost their daughter when she was a little girl, and it is perhaps this wound that has made him so helplessly drawn to the wounds of others.

In the course of the novel, Scobie is repeatedly placed in suffering’s way. First, he is called to deal with the aftermath of a suicide involving Pemberton, a young district commissioner. Suicide is of course a mortal sin for a Catholic, but Scobie feels that God would forgive Pemberton, partly because he was so young, and partly because the dead man was not a Catholic: ‘We’d be damned because we know, but
he
doesn’t know a thing.’ When the local Catholic priest remonstrates that the Church’s teaching is emphatic, Scobie cuts him off: ‘Even the Church can’t teach me that God doesn’t pity the young.’

Not long after this event, Scobie is called away from the capital to Pende, where the survivors from a shipwreck are being treated. He watches a young girl die, and the experience naturally rouses terrible memories. His thoughts tend toward questions of theodicy, the intolerable struggle to make sense
of
God’s providence in a world of pain and sin—‘that was the mystery, to reconcile that with the love of God. And yet he could believe in no God who was not human enough to love what he had created.’ He thinks of Pemberton’s death: ‘What an absurd thing it was to expect happiness in a world so full of misery.’ Given the amount of suffering there is, the amount of pity one feels might well be limitless. Looking at the stars, Scobie reflects: ‘If one knew, he wondered, the facts, would one have to feel pity even for the planets? If one reached what they called the heart of the matter?’

It is in Pende that Scobie meets Helen Rolt, one of the survivors, who lost her husband at sea. She is young, childlike, unattractive. Scobie is drawn to her, feeling her unattractiveness ‘like handcuffs on his wrists.’ While Louise is away (she has managed to escape to South Africa), Scobie and Helen begin an affair. Scobie is once again married to misery, though this time adulterously. His life begins to unravel when Louise returns home. Scobie is torn between his responsibility to his wife and his responsibility to his mistress. A Syrian merchant, Yusef, has essentially blackmailed him, and as a result of his involvement with the Syrian, Scobie’s servant boy, Ali, is killed. Wilson is spying on Scobie, and also courting his wife. Meanwhile, Louise, who in fact knows about the affair (so we learn at the book’s end) is slyly forcing Scobie to attend communion, knowing that in order to do so he must first confess his sins to Father Rank, and must be pure in mind and spirit. It would be a grave sin to take communion while uncleansed. Scobie manages to wriggle out of one mass, but finally succumbs to his wife’s pressure, and takes communion in an agony of damaged faith. As he receives the wafer, he is ‘aware of the pale papery taste of an eternal sentence on the tongue,’ and prays: ‘Oh God, I offer up my damnation to you. Take it. Use it for them.’

Scobie’s ultimate breakdown is religious in nature. His adultery, and above all the crisis of his false communion, seem to condemn him to damnation; he feels that he is ‘desecrating God because he loved a woman.’ When his mistress complains that his Catholicism seems to her bogus, he fiercely replies: ‘I
believe
that I’m damned for all eternity … What I’ve done is far worse than murder.’ In the last fifty pages of the book, Scobie veers between his usual exaggerated feeling of responsibility (he feels that both women need him), and a great desire to ‘get out’—to commit suicide. He seems to think that in dying he can offer himself as a sacrificial victim. Returning alone to church one last time, he sees himself as an outcast, an inhabitant from another country. ‘This was what human love had done to him—it had robbed him of love for eternity.’ He is determined to kill himself, despite the Church’s prohibition, and begins to reformulate what had first occurred to him when he falsely took confession: he thinks that he may offer himself up as a kind of sacrificial lamb, thereby bringing peace both to Louise and Helen, and to God Himself: ‘You’ll be at peace when I am out of your reach,’ he prays to God. The novel ends with his suicide.

The book’s Catholic writhings were much discussed at the time of its publication. George Orwell, reviewing the novel in
The New Yorker
, formulated an objection which is difficult to counter:

Scobie is incredible because the two halves of him do not fit together. If he were capable of getting into the kind of mess that is described, he would have got into it years earlier. If he really felt that adultery is mortal sin, he would stop committing it; if he persisted in it, his sense of sin would weaken. If he believed in hell, he would not risk going there merely to spare the feelings of a couple of neurotic women. And one might add that if he were the kind of man we are told he is—that is, a man whose chief characteristic is a horror of causing pain—he would not be an officer in a colonial police force.

In fact, the contradiction can be posed even more acutely than Orwell frames it. It is not so much Scobie’s lack of fear of hell that startles, but his willingness to surrender the very God he spends so much time praying to. If ‘human love’ can rob Scobie of his ‘love for eternity,’ then he was never a very passionate Christian; but if he is not the latter, why then his
Christian
passion? Another novelist’s reply might be that Scobie is simultaneously a passionate Christian and a passionate adulterer, and is sundered by these competing passions. But there are at least three complications. First, Scobie is not sundered. Instead of, say, miserably continuing to be an adulterer while continuing to feel damned—many a guilty Christian’s version of having your cake and eating it—Scobie chooses to solve the problem by committing suicide, a path whereby he renounces both the secular pleasure of adultery and the religious pleasure of reconciling himself with God; a gesture, in short, that casts doubt on both the reality of his adulterous passion and the reality of his religious passion. Scobie, as it were, bypasses self-sundering in favor of self-renunciation. Second, one of the peculiarities of Scobie’s temperament is that secular passion seems to give him so little pleasure. His sundering might have been more effective if he had seemed to have a genuine adulterous passion from which religion—or the return of his wife—truly threatened to remove him. As it is, Scobie’s motives toward his mistress seem
already
religious, rather than secular: he feels pity and responsibility toward her—charity, in other words. Part of Orwell’s incredulity surely arose from this fact, that Scobie is not suspended between two rival passions but between two complementary charities (responsibility toward the women in his life, and responsibility toward God), neither charity as passionate as Greene seems to want it to appear.

Third, and a consequence of the second point, Scobie has not enough depth as a character fully to convince us of his self-divisions. It may be that in order for a character to seem self-divided, we must feel the weight both of his composed self and the weights, as it were, of his discomposed halves. Scobie, by contrast, is only monochromatically vivid. He is that knowable type, ‘a policeman,’ and has the temperament familiar to us now from a thousand television shows: work-obsessed, calm, controlling, repressed, bad with women, a grim solitary. He seems to have had almost no childhood, and to have no interests outside his work. Or rather, he has one great passion other than his work, and it is religion; but
it
is a passion that does not emerge as such until it is negatively provoked. (He feels, oddly, religious pain but no religious joy.) Such memory with which he is endowed seems limited, and functionally limited, so as to enable the text to ‘work’ thematically: his dead daughter, for instance, which provokes, and sanctions, his involvement with theodicy and pain. He lacks the hinterland, the inefficient or irresponsible consciousness that might make his soul—as opposed to his temperament—vivid to us.

How might Greene reply to this charge? Or better, how does he reply, in the novel itself? Scobie is prey to two kinds of despair, and the novel’s shape suggests that both of them interact to push him toward his fateful act. There is, first, the despair of unbelief. Scobie’s anguished questioning of theodicy, his puzzlement over the mystery of revelation, his heretical determination that Christ was the first, great suicide, and above all his God complex, suggest a mind at war with belief in the traditional, providential God. Scobie is so overcome with the prospect of the world’s suffering that he seems consumed by his twin obligations, ‘pity and responsibility.’ He is not just a policeman but feels himself a kind of surrogate of God, seeing through humanity as its Maker might. He loves the colony’s meanness because here ‘you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst’ It is this hypertrophied sense of religious obligation that leads Scobie, logically enough, toward the extraordinary idea that he is a kind of Christ, who might be able to offer himself as a sacrifice for the peace of Helen and Louise (and finally of God himself): ‘Oh God, I offer up my damnation to you. Take it. Use it for them.’

Scobie also suffers from what might be called the despair of belief, the form of Christian masochism best articulated by Kierkegaard in
The Sickness Unto Death
(it is a curiosity that this very Catholic novel, sometimes called ‘Jansenist’ because of its theological fatalism, often sounds very Protestant—one recalls that Greene was a Protestant who converted to Catholicism). Kierkegaard speaks of the ‘offence’ which belief in God causes all but the most devout believer. To believe that
God
sent His son to die for our sins, that we can pray to Him, that we must imitate Christ’s impossible goodness, and so on—this is offensive to reason. ‘It is too exalted for him [the ordinary believer] because he cannot make sense of it, because he cannot be open and frank in the face of it.’ This is something that can make even a believer ‘unhappy for the rest of his life.’

One crucial element of this offence, writes Kierkegaard, is the idea of sin. It is the concept of sin that most acutely separates Christianity from paganism, says Kierkegaard. The pagan commits sin, of course, but only the Christian sins ‘before God,’ and only the Christian must bear the burden of the inescapable sin—original sin, Adam’s sin. Greene comes close to Kierkegaard when he has Scobie reflect, at the end of Part One, that the ordinary corrupt or evil man cannot commit the sin of despair. Only ‘the man of goodwill’—and surely Greene here means only the believer—‘reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.’ Later, in the throes of his agony, Scobie thinks that ‘we Catholics are damned by our knowledge.’ The novel’s epigraph, from Péguy, avers that ‘no one is more competent than the sinner in matters of Christianity. No one but the saint.’

Scobie is in the grip of a religious despair, a fatalism really, that verges on the heretical proposition that since we are all guilty from birth we might as well be damned, and there is nothing we can do to drag ourselves up from our fallen state. If nothing really separates the saint from the sinner, then perhaps it is not we who will really know the difference between sinning and not sinning, but only God. Sure enough, this is one of Scobie’s—and Greene’s—themes. Scobie feels that God would certainly forgive the young suicide, Pemberton; and he cannot really believe that God would condemn his adultery with Helen. Toward the end of the book, he advances the idea that because Christ was himself the first, great suicide, by offering himself on the cross, such a figure might forgive Scobie for
his
suicide—‘perhaps God could put out a hand of forgiveness into the suicidal darkness.’

The book ends with Father Rank’s near absolution of Scobie’s action. He tells Scobie’s wife that they should not judge the dead man: ‘I know what the Church says. The Church knows all the rules. But it doesn’t know what goes on in a single human heart.’ Father Rank’s generosity is of a kind that appears in several of Greene’s other novels, and here receives, by virtue of its placement, a kind of authorial blessing. Greene, we know, did indeed cleave to this kind of anti-institutional Catholicism. (Again, it is fundamentally Protestant: it is not the Church, but God who knows best.) But what is interesting is how much his novel needs this appeal to God’s generosity, in order to resolve its own contradictions. In effect, the novel offers up the mysteries of motive to an equally mysterious God. The novel says, in effect: ‘don’t ask the novelist, or any other human, to comprehend Scobie’s action. God alone knows why he did it, and God alone can forgive it.’ The book pushes Scobie’s suicide out of the religious category and into the safely mysterious. The kind of contradiction Orwell identified, and which must occur to any sensible reader, and which probably occurred at some level to Greene, is resolved by placing the matter, quite literally, in higher hands.
We
cannot know, or even comprehend Scobie, the book tells us. That is God’s task. Those who find Scobie already a somewhat thin character will find this appeal to mystery a little suspect, a way of sealing an already opaque action from further scrutiny. But it has a certain characterological logic. Scobie has consistently betted on God’s forgiveness—it is part of his distinctive pride. He certainly fears the eternal damnation that suicide may bring, but he hopes that God may spare him. Suicide, in this sense, is his biggest gamble.

James Wood, 2004

BOOK ONE

PART ONE